Getting Started with Subversion

Subversion is an open-source version control system. That doesn’t sound particularly interesting, and at face value it isn’t, but you only need it to save your skin once to realise how useful it can be.

Version control is a method of storing different revisions of the same file, usually source code or documents. This allows developers to see when changes to a file have been made, which can be useful for isolating bugs, and can also be used to “roll-back” a file to a time before a bug was introduced.

Along with these features, version control allows developers to merge two versions of a file, which is very useful for projects with more than one person.

This article covers the following:

1. What software you need
2. Creating a new repository
3. How to set up a Subversion server
4. Adding password protection to a Subversion repository
5. Laying out your repository and importing files
6. Checking out and checking in
7. Using tags and branches

What you’ll need

Subversion – The primary download is source code, but there are binary versions available for different operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS and most common flavours of Linux.

If you intend to use Subversion mostly from the command line, you might want to add the Subversion binaries directory to your Windows PATH variable.

Optional Downloads

TortoiseSVN – If you’re using Subversion with Windows, I highly recommend installing TortoiseSVN. It integrates with the Windows explorer shell, so you can see an icon if a file has been changed. You can and also check in items, commit changes and perform other common operations with a few clicks of the mouse instead of using the command line.

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